Friday, July 24, 2009

BYOS Edition 1.0 now available

Many thanks to all our beta testers for ensuring the quality of our new Xmarks Bring Your Own Server (BYOS) Edition! Yesterday we released BYOS 1.0 to the Mozilla Add-ons sandbox.

If you have been using BYOS beta, please upgrade to 1.0 by downloading from the Mozilla site. That will ensure that you have the most recent bug fixes, and will receive future upgrade notices from Mozilla's site. While you're perusing the page and trying out the new extension, please submit a review! We're also helping Mozilla test out their new contributions platform; any contribution you provide supports the continuing maintenance and development of Xmarks BYOS.

If you currently use Xmarks to sync with your own server and are interested in BYOS, you must first uninstall Xmarks (or Foxmarks) before installing Xmarks BYOS Edition. You will be required to re-enter your own server settings to setup Xmarks BYOS, but subsequent (infrequent) updates will remember your settings.

If you’re not quite sure what it means to sync with your own server, note that this version is for advanced users only as it requires setting up your own WebDAV or FTP server to sync against. For everyone else, we recommend using the standard Xmarks version which automatically syncs and backs up your bookmarks free of charge on servers managed by the Xmarks team.

Finally, please note that Xmarks BYOS does NOT include any of the following bookmark features:

Automatic backup of your bookmarks to the cloud

Ability to restore your bookmarks to an arbitrary older version

Sync Profiles (so you can have different sets of bookmarks on different computers)

Web access to your bookmarks

Mobile access to your bookmarks from your phone

Sharing of specified folders with others

Suggested tags when adding new bookmarks

Each of the above features requires the use of the Xmarks server; if any of these features are of interest to you, then please use our other Xmarks add-ons. And you're unfamiliar with any of the above features, you can learn more about it on our features page.

Thanks again to everyone who helped make Xmarks BYOS happen, and we hope our own-server users will find it useful! Please support each other and share your feature ideas in our Xmarks BYOS user forum.